DON’T SURRENDER IT ALL TO AI

The primary aim of artistic expression is inner clarification of self, as well as personal spiritual development. The secondary aim is communication and sharing of ideas, which in any case always happens automatically as a by-product.

If you outsource all your artistic creativity to Artificial Intelligence, then, yes, finished works of a certain mould will be generated, but your spirit will not grow. And the purpose of your earthlife – the very purpose of life itself – will not be fulfilled. This lies alone in the continuous development of your “I” through self-exertion, self-clarification and the constant effort towards pure and accurate self-expression of intuition via thought into word and deed.

AI will produce works that resemble beauty, but will lead to the atrophy and death of the human spirit – unless you critically interrogate those works and then correct, reject or surmount them with your own personal effort, your own intuiting and reasoning. Don’t surrender to AI. Learn it but remain above it. Artificial Intelligence will make you look good, make you feel good, but only you can become better by yourself, by your own effort. The ancient rule is still the same, there is no short cut to success.

It is very imperative, in this era of artificial intelligence, for each person to remain personally creative, as well as spiritually and intellectually active and independent. Make the effort to think your own thoughts through to the end, and formulate and write them down by yourself. Compose, rehearse and record your own music. Make your own art. Draw the inspiration not just from others, but also, like before, from within the fathomless depths of your immortal spirit. Spend time in the silence of your heart, listening to your inner voice, hearing yourself by yourself and not from the programmed algorithm of an AI companion’s voice.

And also continue to do as many things with your hands as possible. Build. Make. Write. Go out into the world. Use your physical muscles, use your brain muscles, use your heart muscles, use your soul and use your spirit. And also, PATRONISE THOSE WHO DO SO, THOSE WHO STILL PRODUCE BY THE EFFORT OF HUMAN CREATIVITY. When you do this, you are not doing them a favour, but you are doing yourself and humanity and our future a SERVICE!

This is the only way they will grow. This is the only way we will grow. This is how we survived as a species over millions of years. This is how we got here. By the agency of Natural personal Human Intelligence. WE have always been the ones evolving, the ones plumbing our own depths, the ones developing. Thus: Woe betide us today if we now, tempted by convenience, hand that task now over to a self-programming and self-learning artificial algorithm we fashioned. Like the Zauberlehrling who can no longer deactivate or control the witchcraft he awakened. We would thereby have marked the beginning of the end of the story of the human spirit on Earth.

We are the generation that must tame the beast we have created, and ensure that it remains a servant and never becomes the cold lifeless master of our destiny, literally and figuratively. AI is wonderful for sourcing and collating information, and sorting and delivering it coherently. It is also marvellous at generating alternative versions of expressive output. But it cannot see the light. It cannot produce that individual unique recognition that can only come from deep within you. And it cannot produce the NEW, a truly new and different future. It can only regurgitate and re-permutate the past.

The production of Newness is still the purview and the task of the living and active human spirit. Let AI not be our last invention. Let us continue to bestir ourselves to intuit, imagine, innovate and invent even greater creations in the future, greater and higher than AI, and which also come from us – or through us. For WE are human spirit.

Retain your primary art-form in your hands. Don’t outsource it in the name of comfort, or vanity, or convenience, or competition, or materialism. Save and continue to develop that which is most valuable to us – our spirit. Let art, intuition and inspired thinking continue to be tools for personal inner growth through the joy of effort.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

TIME DOES NOT CHANGE THINGS

Time doesn’t change things, they stay as they are. Events change things. Experiences change things. Things change things. Not time. Time only changes the outer appearance of the form of things.

Sometimes a thing that seems like it will last forever only lasts a short time and then changes, because the thing or event that will change it met it early.
While sometimes an other thing that seems flimsy and ephemeral stays unchanged for eternities, because the thing or experience that will change it has not yet met it.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

USING SELF-CONFIDENCE

The most powerful thing you can give people is confidence. Self-confidence. But some people, once they have it they turn around and use it against you, who awakened it in them.

Next time, you feel like leaving people wallowing in their pitiful inferiority complex.

But a part of you still goes ahead and keeps on strengthening people who need it everywhere you meet them. What they later do with this strength and self-confidence is their business.

You have done yours.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

HAPPINESS IS PARADISE

The end result of life should be happiness. If you live a long and “fulfilled” life, and yet at the end you are full of sadness and uncertainty – what was the point?

I don’t know what or where Paradise is – but if it’s not a synonym for Happiness, what’s the point in making it the destination of your travels?

As simple as it may sound, the aim of life is to be happy – nothing more. The difficult exercise along the way is finding your happiness without unfairly or willfully impeding the happiness of another.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE

It is an illusion that Government can save Nigeria. All government can do is more or less throw its weight behind either the fair redistribution of our national wealth or not.

This thing we call “our wealth” however is our biggest self-deception, because we did not create it and do not truly posess it. We simply take what Nature made and sell it and pocket the money without even giving any part of it back to nature.
We then stash away the bulk of this money and share a small part amongst ourselves and use the little rest for “business”. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is inventing itself AWAY from fossil fuels and a system dependent on it.

Real wealth or poverty lies in the ideas that bubble up in the mind. The only thing that can save Nigeria long term is twofold:
1. To learn to transform by ourselves the bulk of those raw materials stage by stage into the final world-class products that everybody else will need and will queue up to buy.
2. To become a scientifically inventing people and culture who already now think up and excute solutions for the time when oil has finished or become irrelevant. A people who don’t eternally leave the inventing of the future to foreigners. That kind of hardwork and industry awakens new virtues and powers in a people and a culture.

Any government that, in addition to meeting its fundamental security and human rights responsibilities, also supports, engenders and midwives this new path, is a government that truly understands and wants to solve the problem LONG TERM. Any other one is just implementing short-term measures, more or less effectively. But the real danger – eventual contextual Recolonialization – remains.

If the Federal Government cannot or will not do it, either because of ineptitude or corruption or bigotry, then each State Government has to step forward and do what is within its power in the service of modernising its citizens – mentally, morally, materially and technologically.

Even on the level of the Local Government – indeed especially on the level of the LG – can the push towards a transformation of the peoples and their conditions take place.

Going by the level of corruption and desperation and visionlessness on ground now, that might seem just like wishful thinking. But I believe events will make it incredibly obvious that we are marching straight back into subjugation – either at the hands of Islamic Imperialism via a hegemonic section of the Fulani power-holders assisted by their lackeys in the other tribes; or at the hands of White Western Supremacist economic, military and political control; or at the hands of rising Asian globalization of dominance spearheaded by the Chinese.

One way or the other we’re going to get it unless we become truly independent and the governments of the Nigerian peoples get right the two points mentioned above, and find a way to tie it into Panafricanism.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

TOLERANCE FOR THE SAKE OF COMPLEMENTARITY

Human society needs a healthy mix of capitalism and socialism. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.

Human society needs a healthy mix of faith and doubt. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.

The world needs a healthy balance between “I” and “we”. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.

We divide ourselves into “left” and “right”; and then we forget that left and right are the two legs on which that which is Human walks, balanced. They are not adversaries of one another; they are complementary to one another. Each must tolerate the other, for the sake of all.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

POWER

All power belongs to God, and only to God. If power is given to you, then you are just temporarily a vessel through which power in part will seek to fulfil the Will of God.

If you try to wield power and to bend it to your own will, and use it solely in service of your own ego and volition, then it will turn against you and destroy you, even if this destruction only becomes obvious to you after you have left this earth and it is too late to stop or reverse your self-destruction via power.

This is the worst kind of destruction, the one that becomes visible only after you have left the earth. You will have to come again as a baby and live a new life, to attempt to painfully undo the errors of the former.

Power is a very strange thing. It is not what you think it is. It is not what you see or think that you are seeing. What you see as power, no matter how obvious or subtle it may be, is just a temporary vessel through which power seeks to fulfil the Will of God. For all power belongs to God.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

STATE OF BEING YOU

It’s hard to get excited when you see through everyone and everything.
And also when you’ve seen through your own self to the core, it’s hard to whip up enthusiasm for things you know well are not you or yours. It’s like a kind of boredom.
Only your small simple little things satisfy your life now and you tend to just want to stick to them, whether the world says they’re right or wrong. They’re yours.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
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ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Every shift in form takes a bit of attention away from content as the consciousness or subconscious seeks through a reappraisal of form, and an attempted understanding of the reason for the shift, to glimpse a hint at the current nature of content. So, the understanding of content – on its way from itself to itself – takes a detour via attention to and understanding of form.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

HOLIDAY IMAGES FROM AFRICA

Why is it that many White people, when they go to Africa, one of the points on their checklist is to go to an orphanage or a Hospital or a village school and take pictures of themselves carrying little Black children and surrounded by little African children?

If I were to come to Europe and go to an orphanage or a hospital or a village school and take and post on social media pictures of myself carrying and surrounded by little White children to whom I have no close personal connection and whose parents or guardians don‘t even know me, I would be accused of many things.

Please, White people, stop instrumentalising Black African children for the purpose of your hypocritical self-staging as supposedly benevolent world saviours. Robbing them of their privacy and dignity, objectifying them, and using them as moral ornaments with which to decorate your souls on social media. They are human beings, they are minors, and they are somebody’s children and wards.

Even if you want to donate to an orphanage or help the under-privileged, you have no right to use it as an opportunity for a foto op and PR session. I’m sure some of you also donate anonymously to orphanages in Europe and America, but you don’t afterwards troop there to pose for pictures with the children to whose welfare you are contributing. You sense, and quite rightly so, that it would be undignifying towards those children. And undignifying towards you yourselves too. Well, the same applies to Black and African children too! And the same applies with regards to them.

Please stop using them as background deco and surround sound for the accolade-seeking self-images you wish to bring back with you from Africa as your holiday trophies.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije